The Fashion Magazine Effect!
You can’t enter those pages without seeing your ‘Self,’ buried under the weight of conformity, breaking free…
Well, if you got your hands on the right ones
The Fashion Magazine Effect
What is it? It’s boldness, glamour, innovation,
and sexiness, all directly infused into your pupils.
The magazine is the only book where mediocrity stands aside,
like a cheeseburger in a gym class.
Once we have it in our hands, the fashion magazine becomes this wonderful object that transcends reality
—t-r-a-n-s-c-e-n-d, look up the definition.
We want to be them: defiant, drop-dead gorgeous, as stylish, as quirky, as impeccable, from lashes to curling locks.
They dare to do everything!
In the pages of a magazine, we can play with looks, with attitudes;
we play. In these magazines, everything that normal people laugh at, here, we loooove it!
The first time I opened a fashion magazine, I was at the dentist’s.
I was 12, it was raining, and honestly, the large bourgeois room smelled strongly of lavender and boredom.
On the table, there was a Vogue lying around, and between that
and TV guides, the choice was quickly made!
I opened it out of desperation, and bam!
I jumped into a portal. Every page was a festival of complex words and impeccably photoshopped faces, all wrapped in an aura.
It was a bit like if Da Vinci and Andy Warhol had many children, and they started composing editorials, brilliant texts, and superbly narrated handbag stories.
Slowly but surely, these magazines educated my eye, teaching me to distinguish chic from cheap, cool from cringe, the sublime from the merely pretty. It was a revelation: all those movies, those paintings in museums, those MTV clips… It was like all the pieces of the cultural puzzle formed the fashion magazine.
A great melting pot of aesthetics, intelligence, and attitude,
that’s the Fashion Magazine Effect.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about this question
—what effect do certain magazines have on us?
And here’s what I found…
Credits: ToiletPaper magazine N°16, 2018
Numéro China, August 2022, photographer Natalie Prabha
